YOU may have a speed-inducing iPod playlist for getting pumped while running and then just hit shuffle to tune out on the D train home from work.

Well, the soldiers in Iraq are no different, using music to help them get through everything from combat missions to a good night’s sleep.

Due to advances in audio technology — i.e., the iPod — for the first time ever war has a personal and portable soundtrack. Jonathan Pieslak, a composer and associate professor of music at CUNY, wrote about the new way of war in “Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War.”

Pieslak first became interested in the subject when he was sending care packages to family members stationed in Iraq and discovered CDs were a hot commodity. After sending more CDs to an Air National Guard unit, he got a thank-you note from a major who said the CDs would be added to the library the troops share.

File sharing knows no bounds in a war zone. Songs are passed from PC to PC and played on personal MP3 and CD players, or even speakers wired into military vehicles.

Metallica were recently filmed for an episode of Discovery Channel’s “Time Warp” which is set to air on Wednesday, April 29th. “Time Warp” is a show that uses new technologies to film all kinds of “ordinary” events and slow it way down so you can see the activity in a whole new light.

Welcome to Discovery Channel’s series Time Warp, in which MIT scientist and teacher Jeff Lieberman — along with digital-imaging expert Matt Kearney — uses new technologies to bring truly never-before-seen wonders into a form that your body can actually process.

Using the latest in high-speed photography, the Time Warp team takes some natural events (a cat licking its paw, a champagne bottle being opened) — and some not-so-natural (a water balloon to the face, a raw piece of chicken exploding) — and turns them into a thing of both beauty and learning.

You can check here for local listings. Metallica will be featured on the April 29 episode

Although the breakout of swine flu that originated in Mexico has led numerous musical acts to cancel performances there, Metallica is not backing down. According to a post at the website of Avenged Sevenfold, who will open the shows, Metallica has booked three concerts in Mexico City on June 4th, 6th and 7th. Although Mexico City is where the flu first surfaced, Mexican health secretary Jose Angel Cordova said on Thursday (April 30th) that the number of cases seemed to be stabilizing, which means the crisis could be passed by the time Metallica arrives next month.In another flu-related incident, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher wrote on his blog that the band landed at the airport in Caracas, Venezuela only to see the place filled with people wearing masks. Gallagher added, “I swear at that point I did a massive sneeze and the entire airport fell silent and started to stare!!”

Billboard.com reported on Thursday that dozens and dozens of concerts across Mexico were canceled or postponed, while premieres and press junkets for new movies like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation were also either scrapped or in jeopardy.

“Those guys really went for it,” recalls bassist Jason Newsted. “Lars would probably be the king as far as that crazy promiscuity goes. Blowjobs under the stage during the bass solo, that kind of stuff”.

Rock icons METALLICA were inundated with offers of sex from groupies during their heyday – with male fans even offering up their own girlfriends to bandmembers.

Drummer Lars Ulrich admits he and his bandmates were so freaked out by the requests they rarely accepted the odd offers.

He tells Uncut magazine, “In the early days in America back in the mid-’80s, people would often ask us to f**k their girlfriend. The first time it happened to me, we were opening for Ozzy (Osbourne) in 1986 and I was slightly taken aback. But you realise people were serious and you say to yourself, ‘So now I’m f**king your girlfriend, are you round the corner, wh**king off? Are you taking pictures? Where do you fit into all this?’ “It’s pretty depraved s**t, and it’s hard to wrap your head around that when you’re f**king someone else’s girl. It’s not a good thing to ask a band to do, right?” source

With Metallica’s in-the-round setup and 2-ton hanging coffins that double as lighting rigs positioned above the stage, the lighting rig itself doesn’t contribute massively to the system’s weight, but the PA system is rather heavy, so the super-structure to support all this has to stand up to the rigors of the tour. “Time was an issue, fitting everything in, but I tried to make everything modular, so the lighting trusses themselves are four V-shaped lighting trusses,” says designer John Broderick. “Each is a module that slides up and down independently, so on load out, some can go stage left and the rest, stage right, making the process pretty straightforward. It has to be a lean machine of a lighting rig because lesser crew members won’t survive the rehearsal.” Read the rest of this entry »

Adding punch to coincide with the ka-blam of John Broderick’s lighting for Metallica’s tour in support of Death Magnetic, Doug Adams of Laser Design Productions and Pyrotek Special Effects was called in for the requisite fire effects (despite lead singer James Hetfield’s onstage pyro accident in 1992) and to add lasers this time around.

“We tried lasers before with a different technology, but it wasn’t quite right, so it went away,” says Adams. “When the band and management decided to reintroduce the idea, John said we should try it for one song only.” So it ended up that one song, seven minutes of “That Was Just Your Life” for the intro, is played with all lasers and no other lighting. The lasers include six 10W DPSS White Lasers hung in the coffins and two seated on stage run live—also not via SMPTE timecode—on a Pangolin show control system. Chris Blair is the tour’s laser crew chief, and Jason McEachern provided programming during rehearsals. Read the rest of this entry »

Castro Valley rock legend Cliff Burton was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Bay Area band Metallica this month.

Burton’s father, Ray, accepted his son’s honorary induction during ceremonies in Cleveland, Ohio on April 4.

Cliff Burton, best known as a heavy metal bass player who made use of distortion and special effects, was killed in an accident in 1986, four years after joining Metallica. It was Burton’s early influence that helped create Metallica’s unique musical style for which the band has become famous.

Also attending the induction ceremony was San Leandro photographer Rick Brackett, who knew and photographed Burton in the 1980s when the musician played in gargage bands across Castro Valley and Hayward during the early days.

“It felt like an honor to be invited to go,” said Brackett. “I even postponed a trip to Africa because I couldn’t miss this once in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Read the rest of this entry »

Designer John Broderick has been working with Metallica since 1988, except for a few years when Butch Allen handled some tours while Broderick attended to other duties. The band’s latest world tour, in support of album Death Magnetic, represents Broderick’s return to designing for the heavy metal band that formed in 1981.

The design for the tour includes an in-the-round setup, complete with 2-ton hanging coffins that double as lighting rigs positioned above the stage. “We were heading for an in-the-round design the whole time; we had done it several times before,” says Broderick. Originally planning to include video, band management nixed all the video just three weeks prior to production rehearsals, after fans and critics loved the lighting-only version during some early previews in Europe. “Some reviews actually said the show was refreshing without video,” adds Broderick. Read the rest of this entry »

Metallica announced on Tuesday that their digital box set is out at last. Here is what they had to say: Well it doesn’t really come in a box, but starting on April 14 our entire discography will be available on iTunes as a “digital box set” so that for one price, you can download the entire catalog.

What exactly does “entire catalog mean?” you ask . . . that would be 163 tracks including all the studio albums from Kill ‘Em All up through Death Magnetic, S&M, Some Kind of Monster, the two tracks from Live From Live Earth, and “I Disappear” from the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack. Our little set here also includes the live tracks that were released as part of the album versions on iTunes: “The Four Horsemen,” “Whiplash,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Creeping Death,” “Battery,” “The Thing That Should Not Be,” “One,” and “…And Justice For All.”

iTunes will be the only place you can find the digital downloadable box set

Sessions, a leading snowboard and action sports company that designs, merchandises, sources, and distributes high-performance snowboard apparel and accessories for the core, youth-driven sports segment, has produced a special Metallica M4 jacket.

Sessions’ affiliation with METALLICA stems from company owner Joel Gomez’s relationship with Marc Reiter from the band’s management company, Q Prime Management, and METALLICA frontman James Hetfield, whose similar interests in skateboarding and snowboarding led them on a snowboard trip to Squaw Valley USA in Lake Tahoe, California in 1997.

This jacket shows Sessions’ true dedication to its roots, while still looking towards the future. This special jacket comes equipped with a two speakers found in the hood, an amp, and a custom control panel on the sleeve. Experience what the slopes can bring, with a jacket made for the elements and equipped with a speaker/amp system from Skullcandy, which includes musically inspired designs from the most popular heavy metal band of all time.